The Clapham house has been designed to bring the spirit and sensuality of the wonderful rear garden deep into the house, choreographing a sequence of luxurious sculptural spaces. The client’s lifestyle requirements have been satisfied by linking the spaces of their various passions such as cooking with entertaining, reading with writing, and gardening.
Atmos Studio has utilised the garden as prime architectural generator helping to capture the clients’ brilliant energy and to formulate this essence into built form and lived space. This has been achieved by weaving a seamless landscape around the passage of light and the movement of its inhabitants.
The house centres on a living room sinuously flowing out into the garden, and vice versa. The living room’s roof supports a second garden above, providing a patio at the feet of the master bedroom.
Walls and floors drift from the interior out to the great outdoors, the study, kitchen and living room, straddling the delicate rear blade of glass, with their pockets expanding to form great hills and planters. The floor curls into a series of steps and an elevated seating area above the sloping lawn. Ceiling slots craft serpentine rivers of light that slide through all apertures and across the sequence of spaces.
The stair is formed from a series of threads hanging from above and delicately pulled back like a veil at the edge of the floor, gently splaying around the corner to welcoming the arriving visitor. The timber edges of each tread curl into and up this railing wall, twisting upwards to merge into the handrail before trailing downwards once more, merging as handrail and twisting to blend back into the lowest tread.
The stairs have been designed as a centerpiece of the house, conceived as a delicate and highly articulated mathematical sequence. The stair was entirely digitally fabricated using an intricate set of simply-cut but highly-detailed flat-pack elements, CNC-carving sheets of MDF and oak directly from the drawings. This has helped in engraving depths to further split structural strands into ever-finer lineaments, producing elements that flawlessly fit together like an architectural jigsaw. The pieces assemble into a highly-articulated, economic and sculptural three-dimensional space that appears to be constantly changing as one travels through it.
The risers of the steps extend as vegetal beams to the bathroom below, growing from the structural wall like the boughs of a tree, holding aloft a lattice of vegetation above while tangling the toilet throne below. This detailed and sinuous journey continues throughout the house, a simple line climbing to open and form a pocket of light or furnishing, carrying the eye onwards in its adventure through the home.
